


born to the hurricane

by orphan_account



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always the Opposite Sex, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-17
Updated: 2012-04-17
Packaged: 2017-11-03 19:32:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year Sidonie Crosby started playing in the QJMHL was the year Jess quit figure skating, and the moment she realised that skating could still be her life – that she could go all the way in hockey if she wanted to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	born to the hurricane

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-

 

“Fucking _fuck_ ,” Jess says, and kicks the wall at the base of her stall. It’s better than punching it, and hey, it’s even appropriate.

“Whoa, there, tiger,” Dwyer says, sounding amused, and that pisses her off more. When she rounds on him, he holds up his hands, palms out, shrugging but kind of grinning, and Jess whirls back and kicks the wall again. Assholes still think it’s cute when she’s mad. 

No one else says anything to her while she’s stripping off the rest of her padding, and she gets changed and bundles up her shit without further commentary. She slams the car door shut when she gets in, and swears at a dickhead who tries to cut her off, and slams the car door again when she pulls up. She’s still pissed when she lets herself into her apartment, but slamming the door or punching the wall isn’t an option; she wants her deposit back, eventually, and her neighbors would probably give her shit, and Jess is completely fucking done with taking shit today, this week, this month, this year. 

She leaves her stuff on the floor of her living room and gets in the shower. Showering at the rink is still more trouble than it’s worth, half the time; she doesn’t give a shit, at this point, but some of the others still do. It’s easier to just change into sweats and shower later instead of reminding them that she’s not one of the guys. It’s not like there’s anyone around to smell her on the drive home, and she doesn’t have a roommate. She lived in hotels the first year, and now she has her own place, because rooming with one of the team was never even considered by management.

The shower helps, kind of, and by the time Jess’s done she’s less angry than she is upset. It was easier being angry at Shanahan than it is being angry at herself, and thinking about what it means to be suspended for two games, now, at the end of the regular season. It’s not like they have much shot at the eighth seed, but. Fuck, she could kill Nichol. Jess can remember the hit, can remember going down and her back hitting the ice, and knowing that she was vulnerable and Nichol was probably going to check her again, and just – needing to get away, get clear, get back on her feet. She can’t remember deciding to kick him, consciously; if she’d thought about it, she wouldn’t have done it, because she was pissed but not stupid. But when she’s pissed, she gets stupid.

So she’s not going to Minneapolis. Big deal. What do they have there? She’s not missing anything. And Winnipeg is boring as hell, anyway. At least she’s not suspended for any home games, because if there’s anything worse than not being able to be on the ice or the bench, it’s sitting in the box and having to wear a dress. If she wore a suit no one would say anything to her face, but they’d look all the things they weren’t saying, and she’d make Deadspin again and all the local and sports rags. 

 

-

 

She put up with enough of that bullshit in figure skating, which had been fun until it got serious. It had only really hit Jess when she was preparing for her pre-novice test; her coach was talking seriously about novice testing as soon as her flip stopped lipping so badly and her axel got more reliable, maybe Nationals next year and junior testing the year after if she started getting her triples. 

That had been about the point when they started talking just as seriously about what she was going to wear as they did about her fucking flat-bracket three-bracket. No, she couldn’t wear her practice gear to a test. She should probably avoid whites and pastels, because they’d wash out against the ice. In fact, she should probably avoid pastels all together; they didn’t suit her colouring. Jewel tones only. Darker was more modest, and it contrasted well with the ice. No, she couldn’t wear pants, and no, she couldn’t wear shorts; she needed a skirt, one that sat flat against her hips, short enough that it wouldn’t interfere with sitspins, maybe four or five inches. Her coach was a nice guy in his forties and Jess was pretty sure that he was gay, but it was still really fucking weird to have him cough and rub the back of his neck and talk about pantylines, because the bottom of her leotard was going to be exposed and she probably shouldn’t wear underwear because no one wanted to see an overlapping line when she went into her spiral. 

No nailpolish, and no excessive jewellery, and the stupid Sun-In streaks in her hair that she’d let Erica put in over the summer were going to have to go. She was going to have to learn how to do mascara and lipstick and a little blusher, maybe some eyeliner – not enough to look unnatural or immodest, but enough to give her facial features definition from the stands. It made sense, when you thought about the choreography and the artistic factors and everything; expressing appropriate emotion and being seen to express it was important, but Jess didn’t start skating to learn how to do hair and makeup. She skated because she loved going fast and she loved jumping and the triumph of holding onto a landing even when it was shaky as fuck, loved it so much that she did stupid things like practicing her 2A until her ass was covered in bruises from falling; even in the public skates when you weren’t meant to scare the amateurs, even when it meant that she got cautioned and had to skate punishment drills under her coach’s pissed-off eye until her knees ached.

She passed, and she’d actually gone all the way to Nationals next season and picked up bronze in Juvenile, but her coach had received a private word from the judges – and that was how they did things, no one came out and _said_ anything, it was just word of mouth travelling along the grapevine, supervisor to coach, rink mom to rink rat. Nothing was ever private, but nothing was open, either. She had potential, but she needed artistic development, which was basically synonymous with ‘jocky and athletic and not feminine – or Russian – enough’. 

Jess had gotten home from Edmonton and hung her medal from the corner of the mirror, where it clinked against her regional medals. She’d had her photo taken backstage with the senior ladies’ medallists, and she’d stuck those in the edge of the mirror, where she could see them. She was smiling in them, grinning like it was the happiest day in her life with the medal around her neck and the bouquet in her arms, standing between Joannie Rochette and Cynthia Phaneuf.

She’d looked at the photos and at the medal, and she’d looked at herself in the glass and seen someone who didn’t suit pastels, someone who was going to have to grow out her hair if she ever wanted to be scored fairly, someone who had been told that she needed to wear her tights over her boots next time, because her legs were short enough that wearing the boots over top ruined her extension. 

Jess sat out the next season. She still went to the rink nearly every day, because she didn’t want to stop skating. She still practiced spins and jumps during public skates. But she stopped taking skating lessons, even when her coach looked at her like she was kind of breaking his heart. 

She doubled up on hockey practice instead. Jess had played since she was a kid, loved the shit out of playing hockey; the speed and the thrill and the way you got to measure yourself against other players and beat them. Figure skating didn’t give that to you, but figure skating was something you could take seriously. If you were a girl and you had your jumps, you could go all the way to the Olympics. You could get your face on the Wheaties box. The biggest stars in figure skating were women, and pretty much always had been. 

Hockey was different. The CWHL wasn’t the NHL, and the all-time hockey fans who had season tickets to NHL games and played fantasy hockey every year sometimes couldn’t even name a single woman who played at a national level.

Sidonie Crosby changed that at sixteen, when her parents sued the Quebec Junior Major Hockey League for her right to play and won. The Rimouski Océanic had drafted her, and she’d made headlines throughout Canada in her navy jersey, a sullen-faced dark girl with her arms crossed awkwardly over her chest under the snarling shark. 

The dust had barely settled on that before she was all over the news again at the end of the season, on the shortlist for the Beliveau Trophy. Despite her percentages she’d missed out, but ended up with the dubious consolation of Personality of the Year, something even the most extremist single-sex hockey supporters could hardly deny she’d earned. Everyone in hockey was talking about Sidonie Crosby that year, and everyone was watching the year after, when she made the shortlist for the Beliveau again, this time with an A on her shoulder; that year the outcry against her had been more muted, and the voices pointing out her scoring percentage had been louder. In 2005, she’d been signed to the Pittsburgh Penguins as an unrestricted free agent after being excluded from the NHL Draft, and that photo of her wearing the Penguins jersey and standing next to Mario Lemieux, the guy who’d been backing her legal bid to play since the QJMHL, had flashed across North America. She’d played a year in the AHL before playing her first NHL game, and after that the door that Manon Rheaume had cracked just a little was open for real, if you were good enough. 

The year Sidonie Crosby started playing in the QJMHL was the year Jess quit figure skating, and the moment she realised that skating could still be her life – that she could go all the way in hockey if she wanted to. 

 

-

 

Jess’s changed into clean sweats and a tank top and is towelling her hair when her phone goes off. It’s Eric, and she hits ignore because she doesn’t want to deal with him. He’s probably pretty disappointed in her, and worried about their playoff chances, and he’ll try not to let it come across, but it will; and the one thing Jess really can’t deal with is Eric Staal when he’s sad. Which is stupid, because he’s a grown-ass man, but it’s kind of the worst thing in the world. 

She hits ignore twice more before turning her phone off and turning the TV on, but she’s only halfway into an episode of Law and Order: SVU when there’s knocking on her front door. She doesn’t even need to peer through the fish-eye peephole to figure out who it is. 

“What are you doing? You’ve got a flight in the morning,” she says, and when Eric shrugs and moves forward, she stands her ground, keeping the crack in the door too narrow enough for him to come in. “Seriously, you didn’t need to come over.”

“You left after practice pretty fast,” Eric says, like that’s enough explanation. He raises his eyebrows a little, which Jess guesses means _and you beat up on an innocent wall and peeled out of the parking lot like your ass was on fire._

“I wanted to shower,” Jess says dismissively, running her fingers through her short damp hair in illustration. Eric’s eyes flicker up, tracking, then level on her again, eyebrows rising further. She crosses her arms over her chest defensively. “What?”

“I think we need to talk.”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “And I already had a talk with Kirk, okay? Right after I got off the phone with Shanahan. I’ve heard it.”

“I’m not gonna yell at you,” Eric says. 

“Sure,” Jess says. She doesn’t say that a bracing morale booster would be even worse, but Eric must read something in her face, because he adds “I’m not going to tell you it’s not fair, either, because you pretty much deserved that one.”

Jess scowls, but she steps back from the doorway. “Fuck off.”

“Nope,” Eric says, and brushes past her. “You got any beer?”

She does, obviously, and when she comes back with a couple of bottles, Eric’s made himself comfortable on her couch, leaning forward on his elbows with his eyes fixed on the TV, squinted in concentration, and his mouth a little open. She watches him for a moment, but he doesn’t seem to notice that she’s there until she says “Hey, catch,” and tosses him one. 

It’s a little unfair that, even surprised, he still manages to catch it without undue flailing. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Jess says, because her mother raised her properly, and he is her captain even if he does make stupid faces when he’s watching TV. She sits down on the other end of the couch and opens her beer with a wrenching wrist-twist that’s probably a little too aggressive, because when she glances back at Eric he’s doing the eyebrow thing again. “What?”

“We’re not going to talk until you’ve had a drink.”

Jess is pretty sure that enabling underage drinking isn’t something Eric’s supposed to be doing when he’s wearing his captain hat, but she pounds it back obediently, while Eric gulps his in a handful of easy swallows. “Okay?”

“Another one,” Eric says, giving her a critical looking-over.

“I’m starting to think you came over because you were too cheap to buy your own booze,” Jess says, but she goes back into the kitchen to grab a few more, and when she gets back Eric’s watching her, not the TV. “Are we doing this?”

Eric makes a face. “I told you to have another drink, Skinner. Don’t rush me.”

“You’re starting to freak me out,” Jess says, and it’s a little true, but Eric ignores her and starts talking about Jordan’s latest attempt at facial hair (“Mangy as fuck,”) and how the Checkers are doing, (not great) and Jess drinks her beer and relaxes by inches back into the couch and Eric’s overslung arm. She likes it when Eric talks to her like this, like she’s just one of the team and just one of the guys, an equal. It had freaked her out a little as a rookie, when Eric Staal would put his arm around her shoulders and ask her opinion on Dalpe’s prospects and their latest plays and get her to come out with him and Cam and Erik like he genuinely hadn’t noticed she was an eighteen-year old girl, and she couldn’t tell if that was really the case or some weird condescending thing. The only time she’d brought it up, though, after her fourth NHL game and her second NHL goal, he’d blinked at her and said “My brother plays with Crosby, Skinner. She’s pretty much the reason he’s even got his name on the Cup,” and that had been it, really. 

“That’s better,” Eric says with some satisfaction when Jess’s unwound enough to actually laugh at one of his lame jokes, and grins back at her when she tries to frown instead. “Come on, flash me those dimples.”

“Ugh, you suck,” Jess says, but feels her mouth curve reluctantly anyway. It’s just Eric’s stupid beaming triumphant face. “Is that why you came over?”

“You know it,” Eric says. “But we also need to talk about how you deal with this kind of shit when you get mad – Hey, I actually get it, just listen,” he adds hurriedly, but Jess really doesn’t think he does. 

“You can tell me how much you get it when you’re the one getting targeted every second you’re on the ice,” she says, tensing up again. “Tell me how calm you’d be when you’re getting slashed every time the refs are looking the other way, when every fucking bruiser on the other team’s getting in your face and trying to piss you off –”

“It’s part of the game, Jess,” Eric says, and tightens his arm around her shoulders when she opens her mouth to argue. “I’m not telling you that they’re not targeting you because you’re a girl, but the reason they’re hitting you so much this season is because you keep rising to the bait. It’s not fair, but that’s how it works. They know you’re going to get provoked, and they know every minute you spend in the penalty box is a minute of penalty kill that hurts us, because we need you on the ice. Because you’re _good_ , Jess. Crosby gets her share of shit for being a girl and being good at it, too, but she doesn’t try to fight guys with a foot of height and sixty pounds on her.”

That’s a comparison which is seriously unfair, because Sidonie Crosby might do her best to outskate the assholes trying to bodycheck her, but Sidonie Crosby has Cooke on the ice to back her up with his body and his fists, and Sidonie ‘Crysby’ has a reputation for whining and unfair favouring from refs unsurpassed by any guy in the league, and the fact that she won’t fight and that no one will seriously ask her to is touted as another example of the NHL’s decline since going co-ed. 

Jess drops the gloves and asks dickheads if they want to go because there’s technically nothing in the rules against women fighting; the addition of a handful of female players hadn’t brought about any official revisions to the code, despite the lobbying on both sides of the debate. No one’s ever seriously gone at it with her, and she’s chalked up penalty minutes for instigating, but it gets the point across: the guys who hook and crosscheck when the puck’s nowhere near her still won’t face up to her straight and fight. They can complain all they like that it’s unfair to use the unwritten rules against them like that; Jess’ll fight, if they will. It puts them in their place like nothing else. 

“We wouldn’t be talking about my ‘anger problem’ if I was a guy - ”

“I’d say exactly the same thing you if you were a guy,” Eric says, his voice absolutely sure, and Jess gets that he honestly believes that, but she doesn’t. 

“Then why am I the only one getting the talk?” The fact that she’s the only one officially suspended for kicking is undeniable, but she has an actual point beyond that. Eric treats her like an equal, but he doesn’t treat most of the other guys on the team like that; he treats her like she’s special, and he always has. She’s the one who has the stall next to him in the locker room, and she’s the one he picked for All-Star weekend last year. “The last time we played the Habs, you actually got up in PK’s face and told him off for checking me. You wouldn’t do that for a guy.”

“I would!” Eric insists, and when Jess just looks at him, he flushes, scrubbing at the back of his neck. “Seriously, I would. You’re like my kid brother, and no one messes with my kid brother. And I don’t like Subban. He’s dirty.”

That’s bullshit, because Eric treats his actual kid brothers like a brawling lion treats unruly cubs. He thinks Jordan’s mugshot is hilarious and still has it taped to his fridge, and he’s always made a point of checking him and Marc extra-hard whenever the Canes play Pittsburgh or New York; he may have been eaten up over the concussion, but that doesn’t mean he stopped giving his brothers shit. 

“There’s nothing wrong with PK’s play,” Jess says instead, because she hadn’t given a shit about that check; it was clean, and it was PK just playing the game, not a deliberate attempt to get her to snap. 

She likes PK, but Eric never has. It had been funny at All-Star weekend, when Eric had glared at PK like he was a terrible influence on Jess and a potential threat to her honor every time he’d seen them together. PK had walked her back to her room after they’d hooked up in his, both of them still drunk and giggling and touchy, and they’d stopped in the corridor to make out one last time, and it had been incredibly hilarious when Eric had popped out of their room like a jack-in-box; even Eric’s offended, disappointed silence after PK had bolted and Jess had been on her own had been funny. They usually didn’t give her co-ed rooming assignments, but she’d been a late addition; maybe if Crosby hadn’t been out with injury, they would have stuck Jess with her, but as it was, they’d put her with Eric, probably hoping that he would be a dampener on any potential hijinks, since he was her captain, and a family guy, and they probably thought he’d be a good influence. Which just proved that they didn’t really know Eric, but whatever. 

It hadn’t been funny when Eric had stepped in to defend her from PK on the ice. 

“Sure,” Eric says. He unwinds his arm, sets his empty bottle carefully on the carpet, and stands up. Jess’s shoulders feel cold and very bare, suddenly. “I need to go, Jess, but I want you to think about that while you’re sitting out, okay? Remember that you’re good, and we need you on the ice, not in the box, and that’s why they’re trying to piss you off. Don’t let them.”

There’s a long pause after that, Eric looking down at her, serious and way too soft, and Jess swallows and finally nods reluctantly. It’s not comfortable, letting go of the angry buzz altogether and admitting that he’s not totally wrong. 

“I’ll walk you to the door,” she says. “You’re okay to drive, right?”

“One beer doesn’t do much to me,” Eric says, with an emphasis on the _me_ which makes Jess bump him with her shoulder. He sweeps her into one of his huge, enveloping hugs on the threshold, and Jess curls her hands into fists and hugs him back, every warm solid comforting inch of him.

“You better skate your ass off in practice while we’re away.”

“I do that every day!” Jess protests, and feels Eric huff into her hair. Whatever, it’s true. After another handful of seconds, he lets her go, stepping back, then reaches for her chin and tips her face upwards.

“Keep that chin up.” Jess rolls her eyes, and feels Eric’s thumb slide across from the edge of her jaw to where her cheek will crease when she smiles. “Dimples,” he orders. 

That’s not anything weird or new, but when Jess gives him her best grin, Eric doesn’t let go straight away. They stand like that for a moment in the doorway, his hand on her face more like a caress than the useful affectionate cuff he’ll give anyone.

Eric clears his throat, and then he’s leaning down and his lips are catching the very corner of her mouth, warm and slightly chapped and totally, totally unexpected. He looks red and uncomfortable when he pulls back. 

“Sorry, um. Bye,” Eric says, shoving his hands into his pockets, and then he’s walking very fast down the landing and disappearing around the bend of the wall.


End file.
